Drupal.org marketplace upgrade

The Marketplace section on Drupal.org has been revamped through major changes. Most of it happened a couple of weeks ago, but some are as recent as this week. This post will give you quick overview of what has changed and what you need to know and do right now to keep your Marketplace listing up-to-date.

If you don’t want to read all the details, jump to What is going on next, that is important for your listing.

So what changed?

The structure

When the work was begun the old services pages (part of the handbook) were removed and the new marketplace was titled “Marketplace preview.” That interim title is gone, the old handbooks are gone, and the Marketplace now has 3 sections:

Hosting section stayed completely the same. As for the other two – there are some updates.
Drupal Services now has 2 listings: Featured providers and All providers, with Featured section being the landing page of the Marketplace.

Training section is also now a view of organization nodes similar to the Services section. The fields shown in this view are Title, Training url and Training description, so make sure to fill those if you want to be listed.

The Hosting, Training and Marketplace displays all pull from the same fundamental organization node type.

The rules

After much discussion and weighing of different perspectives and goals we now have new Marketplace guidelines in place, which describe what each section means, what you need to do to get listed, what is the process.

Items to note:

Contributions back to the community is the first and main requirement to be listed in the Marketplace.

Organization pages need to be updated at least once per year. If you haven’t updated yours for more then 12 month, we will remind you via your company’s issue and wait 2 weeks for you to update the node. If 2 weeks passed and node is still not updated, we will remove it from the listing.

What is going on next?

We keep working on marketplace improvements so changes above won’t be the last. 2 important things happened just this week:

/drupalgive

Having a /drupalgive page and feed featured on Drupal Planet is now a strong recommendation for those companies wishing to be listed in the Featured section. For more information on /drupalgive initiative please see http://drupal.org/drupalgive.

Locations

“Countries served” vocabulary has been renamed to “Locations”. From now on the purpose of that field is to display only countries where your company has physical offices. The field value was cleared for all companies, everyone is welcome to update their organization pages with the correct Locations.

We also cleaned up Sectors and Services vocabularies, a lot of duplicate terms are gone, make sure to update those too.

Useful bits

Am I listed?

If you are listed in either Services or Training section you should see 1 or 2 of the following messages on the top of your organization page:

This organization is a Drupal services provider.
This organization is a Featured services provider.
This organization is a Training services provider.

The messages link to the sections of the Marketplace you are listed in.

What if there are no messages for me?

If there are no messages on the top of your organization page it means you are not listed in any section of the Marketplace.

To get listed you need to pass community review process outlined in the Marketplace guidelines.
First step is to request listing. To do so you need to edit your node and check one (or both) of the following:

Request listing in the Drupal services section.
Request listing in the Training section.

Once you save the node an issue will be created automatically in the Webmaster’s queue for each selected checkbox. The issue will indicate that you want to be listed, community members will review your node and comment on the issue. Reviews are performed by volunteers from our community, so please be patient as this process might take some time.

Where I can find an issue for my company?

If you are author of the organization node and you requested a listing – you will see one or both of the following messages on top of your organization page with the links to relevant issues:

Regarding Services listing communicate with webmasters using this issue.
Regarding Training listing communicate with webmasters using this issue.

Links to note:

We are trying to collect most frequently asked questions and answers in the Marketplace FAQ.

Thanks

We are also very grateful to Drupal Association Volunteers and Supporting Partners, who have made all these improvements possible. The Supporting Partner Program crowd sources funds that pay for the development team’s time and Drupal.Org hosting costs. And volunteers are a key part of our team. They donate huge amounts of time and talent to help us make Drupal.org better.